Week 1: Principles and Practices

Homework: Sketch a Final Project Idea

My initial idea for a final project is a musical marble run, where the track elements represent musical events - as the ball travels along the track it generates a piece of music.

The idea is that it would allow non-musically inclined people to literally build a track, and explore rhythm, form and harmony. A bit like a musical version of lego. The marble essentially acts as a playhead, and reads the track elements as it rides its way along.

Track pieces would be placed onto a frame, rather than connected together like a model railway. This would support the track structurally, as well as providing an area for something to read the data from each track piece.

The structure of the run will be a cube, with each layer made up of 4 bars (1 bar per side) - with 4 layers, this will give us 4 bars of 4, totally 16 bars in total. A chain lift at the bottom of the track will take the ball back to the top. To create a loop, I'm considering adding 'block brakes' (like those found on rollercoasters) so that as a ball is travelling down the track, one is locked at the top ready to go once the other has finished and another on the chain lift so that once the locked ball is released this one takes its position.